How Your Room Affects Your Mental Health
Unconsciously, our room has a big influence on our mental health than we think. Living in a messy and disorganized space will likely make you feel overwhelmed and frustrated. Imagine going home after a long day of school or work, to found that you have a pile of clothes sitting on your desk or books scattered around the floor. You must be feeling tired to even clean the mess in your room. The human brain will experience difficulty to process so many things that are going on at once. That’s why sometimes you can also get a headache when faced with messy surroundings.
A psychologist at Mind Balance in Hong Kong’s Central district named Dr. Esslin Terrighena stated that messy and cluttered surroundings can overwhelm us in a lot of ways. Because of how overwhelming messy surroundings can be, we won’t be able to know where to start getting rid of our clutter. It will make us feel anxious and sometimes helpless. When we feel that way, we sometimes avoid cleaning our room or procrastinate, thus the clutter will build up. A messy room will lead to other problems. Picture having your friends over when your room is still messy, or when you need to find something but cannot find it due to the clutter.
Dr. Esslin also added that the human brain will likely find it difficult to rest and focus when juggling a lot of things at once. We will be reminded of things that we haven’t accomplished, whether it’s cleaning your room or even school tasks that we haven’t finished yet. Not to mention the negative talk in our brain, that may tell us that we are incapable of decluttering our space. Another study by Psychiatry Research claimed that there is a strong link between clutter and depression.
Another thing that makes it harder for us to declutter our space is that we believe that it is also one of our safe space, thus we got too comfortable with it, and even clinging to it. It’s also the reason why is it so hard for us to part with objects that are meaningful to us or even in our possession for too long. We will develop a ‘just in case’ though, thinking that maybe that stuff will be useful to us someday. We have our own reason to hang on to things. Maybe it reminds us of happier times or someone we like. It can also mean that we are afraid of a change and that we are too comfortable staying in our little bubble called ‘comfort zone’.
Although decluttering doesn’t mean that you have to throw all of your things in order to be happy and feel at peace, there’s still some effective method to declutter and organize your space. One of the popular decluttering methods is practiced by the best seller author, Marie Kondo. She is known for her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. As stated in the book, there’s a method that Marie use called the KonMari Method. It’s a minimalist approach to solve your cluttered space by making a category of your stuff. Many people link her method with tidying, when in fact it’s more about discarding items that lack value.
To apply this method, you have to make a big pile of all the things you have, then you also have to go through item-by-item and ask yourself if it sparks joy. The intention of this KonMari Method is to discard things that don’t spark joy so that your space will end up clutter-free and able to bring more joy to your life.
Decluttering may seem intimidating, but if you’re patient enough and don’t rush into things, you’ll feel that decluttering can make you feel empowered. Parting with items that may have a sentimental value to you could be hard, but a new and clean space not only could boost your well-being, but also your creativity and also self-esteem. We’ll feel more productive as we won’t be distracted by the clutter in our space and be more focused and balanced. We’ll also experience personal growth as we discover another part of us that we didn’t know we had all this time because we’re so distracted by the clutter in our space.
